[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000-2001, Book III)]
[December 14, 2000]
[Pages 2697-2704]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks at the University of Warwick in Coventry, United Kingdom
December 14, 2000
Thank you very much, Vice Chancellor Follett and Lady Follett, Chancellor
Ramphal. Lord Skidelsky, thank you for your biography of Keynes. I wonder what
Mr. Keynes would think of us paying down the national debt in America
today. [Laughter]
I would like to thank the president of the student union, Caitlin
McKenzie, for welcoming me. And I am
delighted to be here with all of you. But I'd like to specifically, if I
might, acknowledge one more person in the audience, a good friend to
Hillary and me, the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. Thank you, Stephen, for being here. We're delighted
to--[inaudible].
Tony and Cherie Blair and Hillary and Chelsea and I are pleased to be here.
I thank the Prime Minister for his kind remarks. It is true that we have
all enjoyed an unusual friendship between the two of us and our
families. But it is also true that we have honored the deeper and more
important friendship between the United States and Great Britain, one
that I believe will endure through the ages and be strengthened through
changes of party and from election to election.
I wanted to have a moment before I left this country for the last
time as President just to say a few words about a subject which, as the
Prime Minister said, we have discussed a lot, that I believe will shape
the lives of the young people in this audience perhaps more than any
other, and that is the phenomenon of globalization.
We have worked hard in our respective nations and in our
multinational memberships to try to develop a response to globalization
that we all call by the shorthand term, Third Way. Sometimes I think
that term tends to be viewed as more of a political term than one that
has actual policy substance, but for us it's a very serious attempt to
put a human face on the global economy and to direct the process of
globalization in a way that benefits all people.
The intensifying process of economic integration and political
interdependence that we know as globalization is clearly tearing down
barriers
[[Page 2698]]
and building new networks among nations, peoples, and cultures at an
astonishing and historically unprecedented rate. It has been fueled by
an explosion of technology that enables information, ideas, and money,
people, products, and services to move within and across national
borders at increasingly greater speeds and volumes.
A particularly significant element of this process is the emergence
of a global media village in which what happens anywhere is felt in a
flash everywhere--from Coventry to Kansas to Cambodia. This process, I
believe, is irreversible. In a single hour today, more people and goods
move from continent to continent than moved in the entire 19th century.
For most people in countries like ours, the United States and
Britain, this is helping to create an almost unprecedented prosperity,
and along with it, the change to meet some of the long-term challenges
we face within our nations.
I am profoundly grateful that when I leave office, we will still be
in the longest economic expansion in our history, that all income levels
have benefited, and that we are able to deal with some of our long-term
challenges. And I have enjoyed immensely the progress of the United
Kingdom, the economic progress--the low unemployment rate, the high
growth rate, the increasing numbers of people moving off public
assistance, and young people moving into universities.
But I think it's important to point out that globalization need not
benefit only the advanced nations. Indeed, in developing countries, too,
it brings the promise but not the guarantee of a better future. More
people have been lifted out of poverty the last few decades than at any
time in history. Life expectancy in developing countries is up. Infant
mortality is down. And according to the United Nations Human Development
Index, which measures a decent standard of living, a good education, and
a long and healthy life, the gap between rich and poor countries
actually has declined since 1970. And yet, that is, by far, not the
whole story. For, if you took another starting point or just one region
of the world, or a set of governments that have had particular
vulnerability to developments like the Asian financial crisis, for
example, you could make a compelling case that from time to time, people
in developing countries and whole countries themselves, if they get
caught on the wrong side of a development like the Asian financial
crisis, are actually worse off for quite a good while.
And we begin the new century and a new millennium with half the
world's people struggling to survive on less than $2 a day, nearly one
billion living in chronic hunger. Almost a billion of the world's adults
cannot read. Half the children in the poorest countries still are not in
school. So, while some of us walk on the cutting edge of the new global
economy, still, amazing numbers of people live on the bare razor's edge
of survival.
And these trends and other troubling ones are likely to be
exacerbated by a rapidly growing population, expected to increase by 50
percent by the middle of this century, with the increase concentrated
almost entirely in nations that today, at least, are the least capable
of coping with it. So the great question before us is not whether
globalization will proceed, but how. And what is our responsibility in
the developed world to try to shape this process so that it lifts people
in all nations?
First, let me say, I think we have both the ability and the
responsibility to make a great deal of difference by promoting
development and economic empowerment among the world's poor; by bringing
solid public health systems, the latest medical advances, and good
educational opportunities to them; by achieving sustainable development
and breaking the iron link between economic growth, resource
destruction, and greater pollution, which is driving global warming
today; and by closing the digital divide.
I might say, parenthetically, I believe there are national security
and common security aspects to the whole globalization challenge that I
really don't have time to go into today, so I'll just steer off the text
and say what I think briefly, which is that as we open borders and we
increase the freedom of movement of people, information, and ideas, this
open society becomes more vulnerable to cross-national, multinational,
organized forces of destruction: terrorists; weapons of mass
destruction; the marriage of technology in these weapons, small-scale
chemical and biological and maybe even nuclear weapons; narcotraffickers
and organized criminals; and increasingly, all these people sort of
working together in lines that are quite blurred.
And so that's a whole separate set of questions. But today I prefer
to focus on what we have to do to see that this process benefits people
in all countries and at all levels of society.
[[Page 2699]]
At the core of the national character of the British and the
American people is the belief in the inherent dignity and equality of
all humans. We know perfectly well today how children live and die in
the poorest countries and how little it would take to make a difference
in their lives. In a global information age, we can no longer have the
excuse of ignorance. We can choose not to act, of course, but we can no
longer choose not to know.
With the cold war over, no overriding struggle for survival diverts
us from aiding the survival of the hundreds of millions of people in the
developing world struggling just to get by from day to day. Moreover, it
is not only the right thing to do; it is plainly in our interest to do
so.
We have seen how abject poverty accelerates turmoil and conflict,
how it creates recruits for terrorists and those who incite ethnic and
religious hatred, how it fuels a violent rejection of the open economic
and social order upon which our future depends. Global poverty is a
powder keg, ignitable by our indifference.
Prime Minister Blair made the same point in
introducing his government's White Paper on international development.
Thankfully, he remains among the world's leaders in pressing the
commonsense notion that the more we help the rest of the world, the
better it will be for us. Every penny we spend on reducing worldwide
poverty, improving literacy, wiping out disease will come back to us and
our children a hundredfold.
With the global Third Way approach that he and I and others have
worked on, of more open markets, public investments by wealthy nations
in education, health care, and the environment in developing countries,
and improved governance in those countries themselves, we can develop a
future in which prosperity is shared more widely and potential realized
more fully in every corner of the globe.
Today I want to briefly discuss our shared responsibility to meet
these challenges, and the role of all of us, from the richest to the
poorest nations to the multilateral institutions to the business and NGO
and religious and civil society communities within and across our
borders.
First, let me say, I think it's quite important that we
unapologetically reaffirm a conviction that open markets and rule-based
trade are necessary proven engines of economic growth. I have just come
from Ireland, where the openness of the economy has made that small
country the fastest growing economy in Europe, indeed, for the last few
years, in the entire industrialized world. From the early 1970's to the
early 1990's, developing countries that chose growth through trade grew
at least twice as fast as those who kept their doors closed and their
tariffs high.
Now what? If the wealthiest countries ended our agricultural
subsidies, leveling the playing field for the world's farmers, that
alone could increase the income of developing countries by $20 billion a
year.
Not as simple as it sounds. I come from a farming State, and I live
in a country that basically has very low tariffs and protections on
agriculture. But I see these beautiful fields in Great Britain; I have
driven down the highways of France; I know there is a cultural, social
value to the fabric that has developed here over the centuries. But we
cannot avoid the fact that if we say we want these people to have a
decent life, and we know this is something they could do for the global
economy more cheaply than we, we have to ask ourselves what our relative
responsibilities are and if there is some other way we can preserve the
fabric of rural life here, the beauty of the fields, and the
sustainability of the balanced society that is important for Great
Britain, the United States, France, and every other country.
The point I wanted to make is a larger one. This is just one thing
we could do that would put $20 billion a year in income into developing
countries. That's why I disagree with the antiglobalization protesters
who suggest that poor countries should somehow be saved from development
by keeping their doors closed to trade. I think that is a recipe for
continuing their poverty, not erasing it. More open markets would give
the world's poorest nations more chances to grow and prosper.
Now, I know that many people don't believe that. And I know that
inequality, as I said, in the last few years has increased in many
nations. But the answer is not to abandon the path of expanded trade
but, instead, to do whatever is necessary to build a new consensus on
trade. That's easy for me to say--you can see how successful I was in
Seattle in doing that. [Laughter]
But let me say to all of you, in the last 2 years we not only had
this WTO ministerial in Seattle--I went to Switzerland three times
[[Page 2700]]
to speak to the WTO, the International Labor Organization, and the World
Economic Forum at Davos, all in an attempt to hammer out what the basic
elements of a new consensus on trade, and in a larger sense, on putting
a human face on the global economy would be.
We do have to answer those who fear that the burden of open markets
will fall mainly on them. Whether they're farmers in Europe or textile
workers in America, these concerns fuel powerful political resistance to
the idea of open trade in the developed countries.
We have to do better in making the case not just on how exports
create jobs but on how imports are good, because of the competition they
provide; because they increase innovation and they provide savings for
hard-pressed working families throughout the world. And we must do more
to improve education and job training so that more people have the
skills to compete in a world that is changing very rapidly.
We must also ask developing countries to be less resistant to
concerns for human rights, labor, and the environment so that spirited
economic competition does not become a race to the bottom. At the same
time, we must make sure that when we say we're concerned about labor and
the environment and human rights in the context of trade, it is not a
pretext for protectionism.
Both the United States and Europe must do more to build a consensus
for trade. In America, for example, we devote far, far too little of our
wealth to development assistance. But on a per capita basis, we also
spend nearly 40 percent more than Europeans on imports from developing
countries. Recently, we passed landmark trade agreements with Africa and
the Caribbean Basin that will make a real difference to those regions.
If America matched Europe's generosity in development assistance and
Europe matched our openness in buying products from the developing
nations, think how much growth and opportunity we could spur.
At the same time, I think it's important that we acknowledge that
trade alone cannot lift nations from poverty. Many of the poorest
developing countries are crippled by the burden of crushing debt,
draining resources that could be used to meet the most basic human
needs, from clean water to schools to shelter. For too long, the
developed world was divided between those who felt any debt forgiveness
would hurt the creditworthiness of developing nations and those who
demanded outright cancellation of the debt with no conditions.
Last year, at the G-7 Summit in Cologne, we--Prime Minister
Blair and I and our colleagues--began to build a
new consensus responding to a remarkable coalition, asking for debt
relief for the poorest nations in this millennial year.
We have embraced the global social contract: debt relief for reform.
We pledged enhanced debt relief to poor countries that put forward plans
to spend their savings where they ought to be spent, on reducing
poverty, developing health systems, improving educational access and
quality. This can make a dramatic difference.
For example, Uganda has used its savings, already, to double primary
school enrollment, a direct consequence of debt relief. Bolivia will now
use $77 million on health and education. Honduras will offer its
children 9 years of schooling instead of 6, a 50 percent increase.
The developed world must build on these efforts, as we did in the
United States when we asked for 100 percent bilateral debt relief for
the least developed nations. And we must include more and more nations
in this initiative. But we should not do it by lowering our standards.
Instead, we should help more nations to qualify for the list--that is,
to come forward with plans to spend the savings on their people and
their future. This starts with good governance--something that I think
has been overlooked.
No matter how much we wish to do for the developing world, they need
to have the capacity to absorb aid, to absorb assistance, and to do more
for themselves. Democracy is not just about elections, even when they
seem to go on forever. [Laughter] Democracy is also about what happens
after the election. It's about the capacity to run clean government and
root out corruption, to open the budget process, to show people an
honest accounting of where their resources are being spent, and to give
potential investors an honest accounting of what the risks and rewards
might be. We have a moral obligation both to provide debt relief and to
make sure these resources reach people who need them most.
The poorer these people are, of course, the less healthy they're
likely to be. That brings me to the next point. The obstacles to good
health in the developing world are many and of great magnitude. There is
the obvious fact
[[Page 2701]]
of malnutrition, the fact that so many women still lack access to family
planning and basic health services. Around the world today, one woman
dies every minute from complications due to childbirth.
There is the fact that 1\1/2\ billion people lack access to safe,
clean drinking water; and the growing danger of a changing climate,
about which I will say more in a moment. But let me just mention the
health aspects.
If temperatures keep rising, developing countries in tropical
regions will be hurt the most, as disease spreads and crops are
devastated. Already, we see in some African countries malaria occurring
at higher altitudes than ever before because of climate change.
Today, infectious diseases are responsible for one in four deaths
around the world--diseases like malaria, TB, and AIDS, diarrheal
diseases. Just malaria, tuberculosis, and diarrhea kill 8 million people
a year under the age of 15. Already, in South Africa, Botswana, and
Zimbabwe, half of all the 15-year-olds are expected to die of AIDS. In
just a few years, there will be three to six African countries where
there will be more people in their sixties than in their thirties. This
is a staggering human cost. Parenthetically, the economic toll is also
breathtaking.
AIDS is predicted to cut the GDP of some African countries by 20
percent within 10 years. It is an epidemic with no natural boundary.
Indeed, the fastest growing rate of infection today is in Russia and the
nations of the former Soviet Union. Why makes the point of what we
should do. In no small measure because those nations, in the aftermath
of the end of communism, and actually beginning a few years before, have
seen a steady erosion in the capacity of their public health systems to
do the basic work that must be done.
We must attack AIDS, of course, within our countries--in the United
States and Britain. But we must also do all we can to stop the disease
from spreading in places like Russia and India, where the rates of
growth are large, but the overall numbers of infected people are still
relatively small. But we must not also forget that the number one health
crisis in the world today remains AIDS in Africa. We must do more in
prevention, care, medications, and the earliest possible development of
an affordable vaccine.
The developing countries themselves hold a critical part of the
answer. However limited their resources, they must make treatment and
prevention a priority. Whatever their cultural beliefs, they must be
honest about the ways AIDS spreads and how it can be prevented. Talking
about AIDS may be difficult in some cultures, but its far easier to tell
children the facts of life in any culture than to watch them learn the
fact of death.
In China, a country with enough resources to teach all its children
to read, only 4 percent of the adults know how AIDS is transmitted.
Uganda, on the other hand, has cut the rate of infection by half. So
there are a lot of things that the developing world will have to do for
itself. This, too, is in no small measure an issue of governance and
leadership. But the bulk of the new investment will have to come from
the developed world.
In the last few years, our two nations have gotten off to a very
good start. And yet the difference between what the world provides and
what the world needs for treatment and prevention of AIDS, malaria, and
TB is $6 billion a year. Now that may seem like a great deal of money,
but think about this: Take America's fair share of closing that gap,
$1.5 billion. That is about the same as our Government spends every year
on office supplies, or about what the people of Britain spend every year
on blue jeans.
So I hope that some way will be found for the United States and its
allies to close that $6 billion gap. It will be a very good investment,
indeed. And the economic and social consequences to our friends in
Africa and to other places where the rates of growth is even greater
will be quite profound unless we do.
The government alone cannot meet the health needs, but thus far,
neither has the market. What is the problem? There is a huge demand for
an AIDS vaccine, but the problem is, as all the economists here will
readily understand, the demand is among people who have no money to pay
for it. Therefore, the companies that could be developing the vaccines
have virtually no incentive to put in the massive amounts of research
money necessary to do the job. Only 10 percent--listen to this--10
percent of all biomedical research is devoted to diseases that
overwhelmingly affect the poorest countries.
Now, we have sharply increased our investment in vaccine research,
boosted funding for buying vaccines so that companies know there will be
a guaranteed market not just for AIDS
[[Page 2702]]
but for other infectious diseases, proposed a tax credit to help provide
for future vaccines to encourage more companies to invest in trying to
find vaccines where there are none presently.
I think we should expand that approach to the development of drugs
and keep pressing pharmaceutical companies to make lifesaving treatments
affordable to all. But we can't ask them to go broke; we're going to
have to pay them to do it--directly or indirectly through tax credits.
One of the best health programs, the best economic development
programs and the best antipoverty strategies, as the vice chancellor
said very early on today, is a good education. Each additional year
spent in school increases wages by 10 to 20 percent in the developing
world. A primary education boosts the farmers' output by about 8
percent. And the education of girls is especially critical. Studies show
that literate girls have significantly smaller and healthier families. I
want to say just parenthetically here, I'm very grateful for the work
that my wife has done over the last 8 years around the world to try to
help protect young women and girls, get them in school, keep them in
school. And I hope that we will do more on that. That can make a huge
difference. And there are still cultures where there is dramatically
disparate treatment between girls and boys and whether they go to school
and whether they can stay. If all children on every continent had the
tools to fulfill their God-given potential, the prospect for peace,
prosperity, and freedom in the developing world would be far greater.
We are making progress. In the past decade, primary enrollments have
increased at twice the rate--twice the rate--of the 1980's. Still, more
than 100 million kids get no schooling at all; 60 percent of them are
girls. Almost half of all African children and a quarter of those in
south and west Asia are being denied this fundamental right.
Just this year 181 nations joined to set a goal of providing basic
education to every child, girls and boys alike, in every country by
2015. Few of our other efforts will be successful if we fail to reach
this goal. What it will take is now known to us all. It's going to take
a commitment by the developing countries to propose specific strategies
and realistic budgets, to get their kids out of the fields and
factories, to remove the fees and other obstacles that keep them out of
the classroom. And it's going to take an effort by the wealthier
countries to invest in things that are working.
I hope a promising example is something that we in the United States
started in the last year, a $300 million global school lunch initiative,
using a nutritious meal as an incentive for parents to send their
children to school. I am very hopeful that this will increase
enrollment, and I believe it will. And I want to thank the U.K. and
other countries that are willing to contribute to and support this.
But the main point I want to make is, we can't expect to get all
these children in the developing world into schools unless we're willing
to help pay. I've been to schools in Africa that have maps that don't
have 70 countries that exist today on them. And yet, we know that if
they just had one good computer with one good printer, and someone paid
for the proper connections, they could get all the information they need
in the poorest places in the world to provide good primary education.
Should we pay for it? I think it would be a good investment.
Let me say just a few words about the digital divide. Today, south
Asia is 700 times less likely to have access to the Internet than
America. It's estimated that in 2010, in the Asia-Pacific region, the
top 8 economies will have 72 percent of their people on line, but the
bottom 11 will have less than 4 percent. If that happens, the global
economy really will resemble a worldwide web, a bunch of interlocking
strands with huge holes in between.
It's fair to ask, I suppose, are computers really an answer for
people who are starving or can't yet read? Is E-commerce an answer for
villages that don't even have electricity? Of course, I wouldn't say
that. We have to begin with the basics. But there should not be a choice
between Pentium and penicillin. That's another one of those false
choices Prime Minister Blair and I have been
trying to throw into the waste bin of history.
We should not patronize poor people by saying they don't need 21st
century tools and skills. Microcredit loans in Bangladesh by the Grameen
Bank to poor village women to buy cell phones has proved out to be one
of the most important economic initiatives in one of the poorest
countries in the world.
I went to a village co-op in Nayla, Rajasthan, India, last year,
last March, and I was astonished to see the women's milk co-op doing all
of its
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billing on computers and marketing on computers. And I saw another
computer there that had all the information from the federal and state
government, with a wonderful printer, so that all the village women, no
matter how poor, could come in. And one woman came in with a 2-week-old
baby and printed out all the information about what she ought to do with
the baby for the next 6 months.
So I think it's a copout to say that technology cannot be of immense
help to very poor people in remote places. If it's done right, it may be
of more help to them than to people who are nearer centers of more
traditional, economic and educational and health opportunity.
So from my point of view, we have to begin to have more places like
those poor villages in India, like the cell phone businesses in
Bangladesh, like the city of Hyderabad in India, now being called
``Cyberabad.'' Developing countries have to do their part here, too.
They have to have laws and regulations that permit the greatest possible
access at the lowest possible cost. And in the developed world,
governments have to work with corporations and NGO's to provide
equipment and expertise. That's the goal of the digital opportunity task
force, which the G-8 has embraced, and I hope we will continue to do
that.
Let me just say one word about climate change. If you follow this
issue, you know we had a fairly contentious meeting recently about
climate change, with no resolution about how to implement the Kyoto
agreement, which calls for the advanced nations to set targets and for
some mechanisms to be devised for the developing nations to participate.
There are lots of controversies about to what extent countries should be
able to get credit for sinks. Trees--do the trees have to be planted?
Can they already be up? To what extent the developing countries should
agree to follow a path of development that is different from the one
that we followed in the United States and the United Kingdom. I don't
want to get into all that now, except to say there will be domestic and
regional politics everywhere. But let's look at the facts.
The facts are that the last decade was the hottest decade in 1,000
years. If the temperature of the Earth continues to warm at this rate,
it is unsustainable. Within something like 50 years, in the United
States, the Florida Everglades and the sugarcane fields in Louisiana
will be under water. Agricultural production will have to be moved north
in many places. And the world will be a very different place. There will
be more extreme weather events. There will be more people displaced. It
will become virtually impossible in some places to have a sustainable
economy. This is a big deal.
And the only thing I would like to say is that I do not believe that
we will ever succeed unless we convince people--the interest groups in
places like the United States which have been resistant and the driving
political forces in countries like India and China who don't want to
think that we're using targets in climate change to keep them poor--we
have to convince them that you can break the link between growing wealth
and putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. There is ample
evidence that this is true, and new discoveries just on the horizon
which will make it more true.
But it is shocking to me how few people in responsible positions in
the public and private sector even know what the present realities are
in terms of the relationship in energy use and economic growth. So I
think one of the most important things that the developed world ought to
be doing is not only making sure we're doing a better job on our own
business--which is something the United States has to do--not only doing
more in emissions trading so that we can get more technology out into
the developed world but making sure people know that this actually
works.
An enormous majority of the decisionmakers in the developed and the
developing world still don't believe that a country can grow rich and
stay rich unless it puts more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere every
year. It is not true. And so this is one area where we can make a big
contribution to sustainable development and to creating economic
opportunities in developing countries, if we can just get people in
positions of influence to get rid of a big idea that is no longer true.
Was it Victor Hugo who said, ``There's nothing more powerful than an
idea whose time has come''? The reverse is also true: There's no bigger
curse than a big idea that hangs on after its time has gone. And so, I
hope all of you will think about that.
Finally, let me just say that no generation has ever had the
opportunity that all of us now have to build a global economy that
leaves no one behind and, in the process, to create a new century of
peace and prosperity in a world
[[Page 2704]]
that is more constructively and truly interdependent. It is a wonderful
opportunity. It is also a profound responsibility. For 8 years, I have
done what I could to lead my country down that path. I think for the
rest of our lives, we had all better stay on it.
Thank you very much.
Note: The President spoke at 3:08 p.m. in Butterworth Hall at the
University of Warwick Arts Center. In his remarks, he referred to Sir
Brian Follett, vice chancellor, Sir Shridath Ramphal, chancellor, and
Lord Robert Skidelsky, professor of economics, University of Warwick;
Sir Follett's wife, Lady Deb Follett; and Prime Minister Tony Blair of
the United Kingdom and his wife, Cherie.